Popular Articles

The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform provides visibility and synchronizes data across the CI/CD pipeline by connecting issue tracking and ITSM ticketing tools, so that user stories and change tickets are always up to date.

Subscribe for more!

Containers are popular for good reason. They can help simplify and create more agile software delivery environments. Retaining this efficiency, however, becomes extremely difficult as deployments stretch across multiple applications and environments.

Many customers opt to minimize the effort of managing containers by using convenience features like Amazon Fargate, but as they explore broader use cases, they increasingly opt for more control. So, many have invested in more sophisticated container management platforms, such as Amazon ECS, Kubernetes, or Openshift.

As enterprise organizations look to grow and expand their software and application-based services, they will likely need to manage hundreds or potentially thousands of containers as a single entity. Doing this on a container platform typically requires extensive scripting that is not only expensive to create but also to maintain. Container platforms are great at certain things, but they don’t provide an automated way to deploy all of these moving parts across a widely varying infrastructure. They also don’t include release orchestration capabilities.

Container-based applications require the same release process as all of your other applications. In fact, virtually all of the common problems enterprises face – getting software through a release pipeline and deployed to multiple environments – stay the same. They may get even more complicated as applications evolve to rely on more microservices and more containers across Dev, Test, Staging, and Production environments.

That’s where XebiaLabs comes in.

Achieving Release Orchestration and Automated Deployment at the Container Level

Recognized by top industry analysts as a leading Application Release Automation solution, the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform is designed to scale application releases, as well as the associated container deployments, across complex enterprise environments. The platform uses a model-based approach to deploying software that enables container orchestration without scripting.

At the same time, we understand the importance of giving users the freedom to use their preferred technologies. That’s why we offer a variety of plugins with container management technologies for extending our products.

WHITE PAPER

Containers are popular for good reason. They let developers bundle all the necessary components of an application into one package that can easily be shared and distributed. This approach can greatly simplify deployment to test, user acceptance, and production environments. However, container platforms, such as Kubernetes, Docker, and OpenShift, solve only a fraction of the challenges enterprises face as they try to deliver high-quality software, quickly and securely.

Amazon ECS

The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform integrates with Amazon ECS, allowing you to model not only container instances, but also account for the required dependencies that exist in the delivery pipeline, such as clusters, services, and a whole host of other dependent services and components.

The XebiaLabs platform also includes integrations for Microsoft Azure, which provides similar functionality to the AWS offering.

Kubernetes

Enterprise users have flocked to Kubernetes, the open source system for managing container clusters. The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform provides a Kubernetes plugin that enables resources within this framework to be managed in exactly the same way as other orchestration engines.

The integration uses the Kubernetes API libraries to communicate with the Kubernetes container cluster manager. Users can create container objects, such as pods, replication controllers, and services, directly on the Kubernetes container cluster manager.

The plugin consolidates the management of Kubernetes, while maintaining the compliance and security benefits of a strategic deployment platform.

As with all of XebiaLabs’ plugins, this functionality can easily be extended to cover more use cases as they arise.

OpenShift

Whether you’re leveraging RedHat’s offering for on-premise, in a public cloud or hosted – the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform integrates with RedHat Openshift out of the box.

The Openshift integration allows users to manage and orchestrate the following resources:

Project - a Kubernetes namespace with additional annotations that is the main entity used to deploy and manage resources

Pod - one or more Docker containers running on a host machine

Service - an internal load balancer that exposes a number of pods connected to it

Route - a route exposes a service at a hostname and makes it available externally

ImageStream - a number of Docker container images identified by a tag

BuildConfig - the definition of a build process, which takes input parameters or source code to produce a runnable Docker image

DeploymentConfig - the definition of a deployment strategy, which involves the creation of a replication controller, triggers the creation of a new deployment, and the strategy for transitioning

Rob Vanstone is a Director of UK Sales Engineering at XebiaLabs and specialises in Application Release Automation.

The Reality of Software Releases

Many organizations model software delivery as if the features that are initially planned for a release are always the features that are actually delivered to production when the release is done. But the reality of software releases is more complicated than that, because it’s hard to predict the delivery of planned features. The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform can help you deal with the reality of software releases. See for yourself!

Start Your Trial

The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform provides the intelligence, automation, and control that technical and business teams need.